A career combating human rights abuses
is the most rewarding a lawyer could undertake, co-founder of
EarthRights International Katharine Redford ’95 told the
crowd in Caplin Auditorium to open the Sixth Annual Conference
on Public Service & the
Law in February.

Redford went to Thailand during her first
summer in law school on a grant from the Public Interest Law
Association to write a report on human rights abuses associated
with its logging industry. There she met Ka Hsaw Wa, a Burmese
student human rights leader, then a refugee from its military
dictatorship; they later married. She said she learned from him
that soldiers of the Burmese dictatorship were involved in murder,
rape, and forced labor as they guarded the 39-mile Yadana pipeline
being built to carry natural gas from Indian Ocean wells to Thailand
by the American-owned Unocal and French-owned Total. About 35,000
people live in the area affected by the pipeline’s construction.

Redford returned to Thailand the next
summer, again on a PILA grant, to research World Bank projects
to dam rivers on the Thai-Burma and Thai-Laos borders. She documented
more pipeline-associated human rights abuses. As a third-year
student, she wrote a paper advancing the novel idea that American
corporations could be liable under the Alien Tort Claims Act,
a seldom-used law dating to 1789, if it could be shown that they
were abetting the Burmese military in human rights abuses. Her
professor, Jack Goldsmith, gave the paper an “A,” but told Redford that she was an “idealist.”

EarthRights was founded after she graduated from the Law School
(as the winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Public Service)
with a budget of $40,000. The organization now has offices in New
York ; Washington, DC ; and Bangkok, as well as schools in Thailand
and Ecuador, an annual budget of $1 million, and a staff of 26.

In 1996, EarthRights filed Doe v. Unocal in state
and federal courts. Last December, Unocal entered into unprecedented
settlement negotiations, the first time outside the Holocaust context
that a corporation has agreed to compensate human rights victims. BusinessWeek reported
that a settlement worth $30 million was reached, calling it “a
milestone in human rights advancement” and the largest payout
to such victims in history.

“I found there was an American oil company partnering with
the military dictatorship,” she said. “Hundreds of
thousands have become refugees in order to make way for development.
This is what I discovered my first summer, that human rights abuses
were happening in order to secure natural resources.”